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How to Evaluate the Quality of a Backlink?

The quality
of a backlink plays an important role in maintaining the quality of a website’s
off-page SEO. One may have heard marketers harp on the two main pillars of SEO
– content and backlinks. A website which is able to optimize these two areas
will be able to get a lot of organic traffic regardless of other factors.

In the early
days of SEO, the quality of backlinks a website had did not matter much. Merely
having a lot of backlinks was enough to get top search ranking. This led to
dubious link building practices becoming the norm. SEOs at the time tried to
game the Google search algorithm by using automated link building tools and
getting traffic despite having poor content.

The way SEOs
misused backlinks at the time has led to Google now placing immense importance
on the quality of backlinks. In this article, we discuss the metrics and
methods used to evaluate the quality of a backlink.

Check
Metrics of the Website Itself

The first
step in evaluating the quality of a backlink is checking whether the domain
from which the link is coming falls within the quality parameters. These
parameters convey the quality of the website and its relevance to which it is
giving away the link.

Metrics like
domain authority and traffic are important in understanding whether the website
is worth getting a backlink from. Naturally, a website would want to get a
backlink from a website with a higher domain and overall traffic number.

Another thing
to check is the relevance of the website when compared to the website it is
linking to. A travel website giving a backlink to a fintech blog makes little
sense and reduces the overall strength of the backlink.

How Much
Traffic Comes from That Link

Most SEOs
don’t see backlinks as a source of traffic. However, the number of people who
come to a website through a backlink is often a good indicator of its quality.
For one, traffic from backlinks can mean that the link is relevant and popular
amongst the audience of that website. This can be an important factor used by
search engines to ascertain the quality of backlinks.

In
Conclusion

In this
article, we covered the metrics and methods that be used to evaluate the
quality of a backlink. When building backlinks to a website, it is crucial to
measure their quality as bad links can lead to search rankings falling. The
methods discussed in this article can be used by SEOs across the board.

About the Author – Shyam Prasad is a SEO analyst with a solid track record of work experience with several companies. He currently works as a guest trainer at DelhiCourses.in, a well-regarded training institute for a top digital marketing training in Delhi.